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What if you could double your returns on a 5% increase in stock price with no extra work? Sounds good right? That is the sales pitch you often hear from some stock brokers when they try to convince the average investor to buy stocks using margin - or borrowed money to purchase investments. When things go well, margin has the wonderful impact of multiplying your gains sometimes to the tune of doubling your returns. However, what brokerage houses don't tell you is that when things go bad they …

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If you are building a portfolio of individual securities, then the sectors you invest in should be part of your overall asset allocation plan. Recently I ran a post which energy companies are most predominant in a few dividend ETFs. I took this analysis one step further and tried to dissect what sectors dividend ETFs had represented. I do this to assist my own portfolio building process and asset allocation decisions - I want to make sure I have managed the risk appropriately in my portfolio …

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Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (NIN) fame kicked some music label butt in this past couple of weeks by releasing a 36 track album on his own using only the web as a means of distribution. He racked up sales of a cool $1.6 million. I think this is a strong message for the record companies that things are changing and the middle-man is not required anymore. As usual, I looked at this from an individual investor perspective and came away with this learning: The more people involved with …

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